Given the ever-increasing reliance on telephony communications, the broad acceptance of cellular telephones, and the increasing acceptance of packet-based telephones, a single user is often associated with two, three, or more telephones. In most instances, these telephones are associated with different directory numbers, and as such, people wanting to call the user may have to initiate multiple calls to the different telephones of the user and perhaps navigate multiple voicemail systems prior to ultimately reaching the user.
There have been attempts to minimize the difficulty in reaching a user who has multiple telephones. A simple technique is to establish call forwarding rules, where calls directed to one telephony terminal will be forwarded to another telephony terminal as directed by the user. Unfortunately, programming the various telephony terminals to forward calls is cumbersome, and many users forget to enable call forwarding when desired, as well as disable call forwarding when it is no longer necessary. A more network-centric approach has been to provide a common directory number for multiple telephony terminals, wherein incoming calls directed to the common directory number results in the simultaneous ringing of all of the user's telephony terminals. In such an environment, the incoming call is connected to the first telephony terminal to be answered. Unfortunately, implementing this common directory number approach significantly increases network resources and is often disturbing to those near the telephony terminals that are not answered by the user. Additionally, when the telephony terminals are supported by different telephony networks, there is significant difficulty in facilitating the simultaneous ringing of the various telephony terminals and establishing a call to the first one that is answered.
Accordingly, there is a need for an efficient and effective way for directing incoming calls intended for a user to the most appropriate telephony terminal associated with that user. There is a further need to provide such functionality without requiring significant user configuration or programming to have the incoming calls effectively follow the user from one telephony terminal to another.